Are you saying that you have “00000-500.25″ in a variable and you want to convert it to “-500.25″ in another variable? Or do you want to convert “-500.25″ to “00000-500.25″? Or was the first value just typed incorrectly? Neither of those two values are “numeric”.

What exactly are you trying to do? What are the field definitions and what are some actual example values?

And maybe we should ask why you’re doing it in program code? Usually a minus or plus sign is irrelevant in a numeric program variable. The signs are usually only meaningful to humans when they’re actually looking at a display or a printed report. The sign characters are normally generated automatically by the output specifications, not by program code.

It’s true that there are situations where this should be done in program variables, but I’d sure hate to find out that it all came from a misunderstanding of how to control output! It seems like there are almost too many questions like this.